Electric City: A Novel (8 page)

“Even with a bent spine and asymmetries of form, even when he had to say a permanent no to a certain kind of love in order not to pass along this particular suffering, Steinmetz found a place wide enough to hold an entire family.”

Martin let the words become part of his skin. Too shy to meet Midge’s gaze directly, he preferred these conversations when they were both in motion, collaborative and purposeful.

“He adopted an entire household,” she shouted up to him. “A clan.”

Martin pounded a piece of tar paper into place, followed by a stiff segment of asphalt shingle.

Your mother loved you
, he imagined saying to Steinmetz.
She loved your father, after all, his own hump undisguised when they met, when she had every chance to turn away and didn’t. She died too soon, like mine did. But still she chose to cradle you, and your father allowed your mind to flourish beyond every known container, then released you into the world
in order to be free. Was he the one who taught you courage? Not to accept the burden of other glances and fears. Until you knew how to stand up straight inside your own heart.

Martin’s frequent visits to Electric City’s public library were the counterpoint to his long walks through the woods and alongside the shoreline of the Mohawk River. There were certain revelations he knew to look for in fossils, and others he needed to find in books. Though the texts never named him, Martin knew that his grandfather Joseph had been a close friend of Steinmetz. Historians mentioned a coonskin cap and a canoe, but no hints about the rest. When the time came for Steinmetz to choose a family to adopt long after he’d made up his mind never to have children of his own, Martin knew that Steinmetz chose a white man, ironically also named Joseph.

According to Annie, Joseph Longboat taught Steinmetz the enigmas of the river, especially the mystical pattern of its flowing both ways. Together they had smoked fancy cigars and swapped stories into summer nights, their feet side by side in the shallows of a cooling creek. With Midge, he got to see the images of what remained: the canoe, the bicycle, photos of the Hayden children being taught to swim in the shadows of Camp Mohawk.

Martin would have liked to visit the cabin where Joseph and Steinmetz had enjoyed each other’s company, but it had been carted off for display in a Michigan museum, a relic of the Wizard’s abbreviated life. Martin figured that they must have most of his photograph collection too, organized like all those odd creatures Steinmetz had loved in their exotic perfection. Cacti, orchids, lizards. Precious and fragile
things that could be protected from the cruelties of the world, waiting through their dormancy to restore themselves in the summer, thriving somehow even in the midst of an Electric City blizzard.

The library was where Martin could be hidden by choice instead of the way he felt disregarded so often by other places, at least other places with people inside them. Electric City seemed content to use native names for streets and buildings, but otherwise any living presence of Indians was altogether avoided. Too dark-skinned, too dark-haired, too long-haired. Seemed like where most white people were concerned, Martin was always too much of one thing and not enough of the other.

He couldn’t help feeling the unmistakable vibration of attitudes, brushing up against him with prickly heat or icy cold. He would have preferred to stay home or walk alone in the woods, sit on the river’s cliff-edge and watch the silt-thickened movements of water. But there were times like now that he needed the books on these shelves. If he had to sit and walk and learn among the offspring of scientists, he wanted to make sure that he was still in charge of what details gathered in his mind, still able to select and examine the images and information that mattered most to him.

That’s why he was in the stacks, reading about the Erie Canal and studying one of the black-and-white photographs of skaters on its frozen surface, with the credit naming the photographer as Charles Proteus Steinmetz, 1899. Martin carried with him the photo of his grandfather that used to hang black-framed on the wall, the one Annie said looked so much like him, from the shape of his eyebrows to the line of his jawbone.

There was one drawer of photos in his grandmother’s house that had been taken by Steinmetz: images of his dog Sir, who was nothing at all
like Martin’s dog Bear; the cabin he’d built beside the river; a self-portrait of the hunchbacked man inside his dark wool overcoat and wearing a coonskin cap.
Did my grandfather make that for you too?

Martin glanced back at the image of the skaters again, thinking about Steinmetz and his photos of his grandfather. Lately Martin had been trying to write down certain stories of Joseph’s, before he forgot everything.

He did more than write them down. He had managed to record his now-dead grandfather speaking in Mohawk, telling the story of a bridge disaster, and tales older than that one. His grandmother singing, the melody she made up in honor of Martin’s birth, the one that sang him into the world. When Annie explained how she’d learned to weave baskets or repair beadwork on a ceremonial headpiece, Martin held a microphone nearby, not wanting to disturb her, determined not to lose the chance.

Nowadays there was so much talk about Mother Earth and ecology in school, and sometimes Martin wanted to stand up and make them listen to one of his recordings. His people knew for centuries that the land underfoot and all around was sacred, full of spirit and power, with rights that mustn’t be violated or taken for granted. Teachers lectured about pollution and clear-cutting and damming rivers and DDT in the bodies of dead birds. Martin could have played them just one of his tapes, just one, but he was sure they wouldn’t recognize the sound of the truth.

Just then he felt something peculiar at the back of his neck, an electric warning, and in the space just wide enough between two shelves of oversized books he could see that the girl was watching him. It felt to him as if they had just bumped heads. He thought she was about to come over and say something, ask what he was reading. But she pivoted away and vanished.

S
OPHIE WATCHED
S
IMON
leave early each July morning in his used Mustang, off to spend his days perched on a high wooden chair at the shoreline of the public beach on Lake George. His back and arm muscles had suddenly defined themselves as proof of his adulthood, and he wore his
LIFEGUARD
T-shirt with thinly concealed vanity. Just when she had almost reckoned with his absences while away at college, he was home for the summer. All the same, Sophie felt he had only partly returned. More and more he maintained a separate life that kept him out of the house until night; he didn’t even have meals with them anymore.

When Miriam announced that she would be attending night school to finish her long-delayed bachelor’s degree, Sophie began to wonder if everyone, even her mother, felt like a different person inside versus outside their family. Paperbacks with philosophical titles began piling onto the dining room table, and she realized maybe for the first time that her mother had a mind that carried its own images and information. Both of her parents had grown up speaking another language, and yet now they were living inside their new American skins as if most of that past wasn’t quite relevant anymore.

She thought of the woman her parents knew from the same ship that had brought them to America. In the story Sophie vaguely recalled, the refugee suffered such homesickness for friends and family in Europe
that she booked passage on a return voyage almost immediately, and then didn’t survive the war. Sophie felt haunted by the idea that you could make the wrong choice, that there was no way to be sure which instinct would save you: the one that led you forward or the one urging you to turn back. She understood almost nothing about the woman except her name, Masha Bernstein, and the barest facts of what had occurred. Beyond that, her parents simply said, “Nobody knew. And then, suddenly, it was too late.”

With a part-time summer job at the library, Sophie stamped the books departing and shelved the ones returning, occasionally repairing their protective plastic wrapping or erasing pencil marks someone had left on a book’s pages. She tallied the dates as they turned in their slow, inky blur; she tracked her hours by lining up the spines with their Dewey decimals.

Watching the bored faces of strangers day after day, she sensed an unbridgeable distance from everyone she saw. She imagined Simon feeling it too, squinting behind his sunglasses at the swimmers and the splashers, inhaling the weird aromatic mix of grilled hot dogs and cotton candy and Coppertone. Maybe even her mother was feeling it, preparing her own homework, trying to complete something for herself.

We’re all waiting for something to happen,
Sophie thought. She wrote the sentence on an index card, using first her right hand and then her left. Later, she crossed it out.

The day after meeting Henry at the post office, the second day after the Company picnic, the rain was so relentless Sophie had to ask her mother for a ride downtown.

“I just realized I forgot to make you lunch,” Miriam said, as Sophie climbed out of the car.

“It’s okay. I have some stuff I brought with me.”

“Smart girl,” her mother said and waved as she pulled away.

Something about the greenish tint of the clouds made Sophie think about the secret time she had looked directly at the solar eclipse, the way she knew you weren’t supposed to, testing it out for herself and not going blind. For weeks afterward she wondered if she would wake up blind one morning anyway, as if the slow burning of her retina would catch up with her. She had stood on the street in front of her house, cupped her hands as a small shield against her forehead and looked up. She saw the black curve eating the edge of the sun. She felt the day change color all around her, felt afraid and brave all at once.

Now, the usual stack of returned books waited at the counter, the ones that had piled up in the drop-off box overnight. Sophie could still remember when she and Simon used to take turns shoving their books through the return slot, counting out loud.

Mrs. Richardson, the reference librarian, blinked her usual “Good morning,” barely looking up from her desk. Sophie was certain she loved her job so much she didn’t want anyone to know it, so she frowned most of the time and kept her bifocals pushed down at the tip of her nose.

The cart of
BOOKS TO BE RESHELVED
squealed a complaint when Sophie began pushing it toward the Science section. Behind that sound, she could hear the soothing tempo of rain on the library roof. Here were a few of the customers she saw on a regular basis, all taking predictable refuge from the vagaries of the weather outside. She made
up private names for some of them: Mr. Wallace Street, who read every column of the daily newspaper; Father Time with his weekly magazine; Mother Goose with her dwarfs, who sprawled in the children’s area and preemptively
shush
ed each time the librarian looked in their direction.